Little Meg Reddingoode

Blatant plug here:

Little Meg Reddingoode: An Appalachian "Little Red Riding Hood" is my latest Kindle ebook.

Nine-year-old Meg Reddingoode, who lives in Bedford County in the 1770s, must go over the mountain to take some supplies to her grandmother. There's no one else to go—her two older brothers are away in the Powell Valley in deep southwest Virginia with Joseph Martin, another brother is needed to help with farmwork, and there's no one else to make the trek. Meg is worried about wolves, bears and English soldiers who might be about, but her mother reassures her and agrees to let Meg wear her fine red cloak. Meg sets off at dawn and follows the sun. When she's almost at her destination, she encounters a young man who saw her red cloak through the trees and mistook her for an English soldier. And then—well, to find out more you'll need to read the ebook. It's only $1.99.

I'm delighted with the first review to appear on Amazon: 

Mushko's retelling of Little Red Riding Hood is a winner. The settings and feel for the time period are spot on. Of particular enjoyment was the change of the Big Bad Wolf from a talking animal to a realistic image of a human predator consistent with the time period. The inclusion of common wisdom and knowledge needed in the 1770s makes for a great teaching moment. With this moment in mind, Mushko draws on her thirty plus years of teaching experience by including a study guide to accompany the story. The guide covers more than a literary analysis of the text. It also ties in geography, history, and science making the story a useful inclusion for many different lessons and age levels all the way from kindergarten to college pre-service teachers. The kindle version makes the story easily accessible.—K. Flowers

I wrote Little Meg Reddingoode over a decade ago and used it in my 2005 vanity-published kids' book, Where There's A Will. I decided to recycle Little Meg as a companion for Ferradiddledumday, which I Kindle-published in June. Both are Appalachian retellings of stories from the Brothers Grimm. Besides being entertaining for kids seven and up to read on their own, both will work well in elementary or middle school classrooms. 

Little Meg, like the Ferradiddledumday ebook, is text-only, no illustrations. Currently, I have no plans to do a separate print book. The print version of Ferradiddledumday (which contains illustrations and a study guide) is currently unavailable on Amazon, but the publisher has assured me that this is only temporary and the print version will soon be available. Meanwhile, I have a few print copies of Ferradiddledumday, and it's also available directly from the publisher.

If you like Appalachian re-tellings of old tales, you might enjoy these tales.

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Miracle of the Concrete Jesus

Warning: blatant book plug (with cats exploited for advertising purposes)

I have a new e-book available for Kindle—only $1.99. Miracle of the Concrete Jesus and Other Stories is a collection of nine short stories, six of which are recycled from my print book, The Girl Who Raced Mules & Other Stories. Two of the others have been published elsewhere. One hasn't been published before—but it won a contest. Anyhow, once the e-book was on my iPad, Chloe checked out the cover.

It took awhile to get the cover just the way I wanted, so this blog post is really about the evolution of the e-book's cover.

Here's the book's description: One woman’s surprise gift to her church produces an unexpected result, another woman gets advance warning of an ice storm, another gets down and dirty at the grocery store, another finds a mystery in library books. Add a mule, a kiddie beauty pageant, a dressed-up pig, a bootlegger, an escaped convict, a wannabe best-selling author, and a jar of ashes, and you have Miracle of the Concrete Jesus and Other Stories. These prize-winning humorous down-home stories feature resolute women as main characters: “Miracle of the Concrete Jesus,” “Angel on Ice,” “Down and Dirty,” “The Mystery of Emmaline Carter,” “Insult to Injury,” “Fixing the Blame,” “Eye of the Beholder,” “Query Letter From Helen,” and “Phoenix Rising.”

I spent several weeks getting the text reformatted properly for Kindle. I uploaded the book three times before I got it to where I was pleased with the result. Meanwhile, my cover designer—Eduardo Mitchell—and I conferred back and forth via email about how the cover should look. I sent him a photo I'd taken; he removed a lot of extraneous stuff—tree branches, part of a building, etc. The he worked on selecting a suitable font and arranging the title on the picture. Here are two of the early attempts:

On the cover (left), the red is too serious and over-powering; plus my name is obscured by the statue, and it's hard to read the "and other stories" part. On the right, the font has a cleaner look and the pink color looks better. But will pink work for the title?

Yes! The pink suggests it's a woman's book. Indeed, all the main characters are female. Putting my name in a different font gives the cover a bit more depth. But the cover still needs something—something to suggest that it's not serious. When I showed the above cover to my writers group, they thought flowers would be a good addition—especially a rose in the statue's hand.

In the title story, the protagonist buys a slightly defective Jesus statue for her church and thinks she can disguise some missing toes by planting flowers. So—let's add flowers that show the short stories are light-hearted and humorous. 

Uh-oh. That red viney thing in the left picture is too much. In the picture on the right, the flowers are too high. The blue flower is ugly and the red one seems to dominate. One more try . . .

 . . . and now the flowers look good—just enough to give the cover a whimsical feel, but not overpowering. The colors coordinate nicely with each other and with the text color.

I'm pleased with the final result, even though certain cats (like Tanner) aren't impressed.

Now, Gentle Blog Readers, if you'll just pop over to Amazon and buy the book. . . .

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The Best 'Un Yet

. . .  or The Evolution of an Ebook.

I've been working on recycling five of my Christmas stories as a Kindle e-book. The title is The Best 'Un Yet, for the first story. In that story, newcomers to a rural community try to change the annual Christmas program. The other stories are “The Spirit of Giving,” in which a father takes his children to a mall to receive charity; “‘The Magi’ Strikes Back,” in which a gift exchange goes wrong; “You Don’t Ever Know,” in which children at a rural school receive gifts from an anonymous benefactor; and “You Ain’t Buck Nekkid and You Got Enough to Eat,” in which a country girl envious of her classmates realizes how fortunate she is.

While I've learned how to format and upload the document to Kindle, I don't have the skill or the software to make a decent cover. That's where my longtime friend Eduardo Mitchell comes in. He's designed covers for three of my previous ebooks, as well as his own ebook, Original Zen.

You can read Ed's blog, Quieting the Noisy Mind, here.

Anyhow, when we work on a cover,  we confer via email until a design pleases both of us. Recently, I sent Ed a photo, which he sized correctly and designed and placed text. After four tries, we came up with one that we liked and that many of my Facebook friends liked.

After an earlier draft, here are the first two tries:

#1

#2

I wasn't expecting white text, but I liked it. I also loved the font choice. In #1, the subtitle kind of disappears though. For an ebook thumbnail, each word should be easy to read. For the second try, the change to black text for the subtitle and the drop shadow on my name helps the titles pop out better. The black text also brings out the black in the trees. It's looking better but still isn't as eye-catching as it could be. Both covers say "winter" and "rural" but not "Christmas." Ed kept working.

Number three had red text for the title. Now it pops out, plus the red color suggests Christmas.

However, black text for my name didn't work. Makes it look a little heavy. The fourth one is what we finally went with. 

Having my name in red helps balance the title.  The black subtitle still stands out. The cover is much more eye-catching, and red is a color of Christmas.

I think #4 is the best one yet!

The Best 'Un Yet is available on Amazon for 99¢. If you don't have a Kindle, you can download a free app to read Kindle ebooks on your phone, computer, or tablet. 

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E-book Stuck

My novel Stuck is finally available as a Kindle e-book. Here's how it looks compared to the paperback, which was published by Cedar Creek two years ago.

Little Chloe doesn't seem too impressed. I think she was more excited when the box of author copies arrived two years ago.

On Saturday night, I'd uploaded the file to Kindle and previewed how it looked on some simulated devices, such as the old black and white Kindle. .  . 

. . . an iPhone. . .

. . . and a Kindle Fire.

This is how the Table of Contents looks on the Fire . . . 

. . . and how part of Chapter 1 looks on the Fire.

The e-book version of Stuck differs a bit from the print because it doesn't have the chapter-by-chapter study guide that the paperback has. But, at only $2.99, the e-book is considerably less expensive.

You can buy it here.

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Over Coffee

I've recycled five of my short stories into another Kindle e-book. Since coffee appears in each story, the title of the story collection is Over Coffee.

As the subtitle says, the stories are about awkward relationships. In "HotGuy16," which won the 2007 Virginia Writers club Golden Nib Fiction Contest, an older woman who pretended to be a teenage girl on MySpace, goes to a cafe to check out the teenage boy she met online. In "Making Changes," which placed third in the 1999 Sherwood Anderson Short Story Contest and was originally published in the Spring 2001 issue of Virginia Adversaria magazine, a soon-to-be-divorced redneck discovers the girl of his dreams isn't at all what he expected. In "Chosen Child," which appeared in my 2005 vanity-published collection, The Girl Who Raced Mules & Other Stories, a teenaged unwed mother tells a lie which improves her life considerably. In "The Roadhunter,"winner of the 2004 Lonesome Pine Short Story Contest, two high-school buddies reconnect after being apart for years and find they have little in common. In "Denouement,"a couple meet for coffee to mark the end of their marriage.

Over Coffee is a bargain at 99¢. You can buy it for your Kindle (or Kindle app on your iPad or smartphone) here.

The cups and tablecloth on the cover are mine. Like the stories, they are recycled. The cups are the Ella's Rooster pattern; I bought the dinnerware from a secondhand store in 2008 and blogged about the purchase on my "Frugal Living" blog here. I bought the tablecloth secondhand at the Discovery Shop a few years ago. I took a picture and emailed it to Eduardo Mitchell who used my photo to design the cover. I really like his font choice.

Visit my Amazon page here for a complete listing of my available books. Meanwhile, in the coming months, I'll be recycling more of my material into e-books.

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Rest in Peace

That's the title of my latest e-book, a collection of three short stories that each won the Sherwood Anderson Short Story Contest. Here's how it looks on my iPad.

The three stories had been previously published in my vanity-pubbed paperback, The Girl Who Raced Mules & Other Stories, so you could say I'm recycling them. But they're a cheap read at 99¢. And they're funny.

The title story, "Rest in Peace," won the 1996 Sherwood Anderson Contest. It's about a country boy who wants to be a preacher. He practices preaching funeral services on his baby sister's doll, roadkill,  and his drunken father. 

In "Everybody's Business," the 1999 winner, a small-town jock futilely tries to score with the new girl at school.

In "Burning Bridges," the 2002 winner, a rural Virginia woman tries to set the Yankees straight about the real Thanksgiving, but causes problems at her daughter's elementary school, gets herself arrested, and alienates her mother-in-law. 

Successfully e-publishing my novel, Patches on the Same Quilt, showed me I could learn how to format and publish on Kindle. (I blogged about that here.) Consequently, I'll be recycling more of my short stories in future e-books. 

Look for my next e-book in about two months.

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New Trick, New Ebook

"You can't teach an old dog new tricks," the saying goes. I know the older I get, the more complicated learning new stuff is. So, I wasn't sure I'd catch on to making my 2001 self-published novel into a Kindle ebook.

But I did learn how. It wasn't terribly difficult, but it was complicated and tedious. What helped most was downloading a free ebook from Amazon, Building your book for Kindle for Mac. Since I have a very old version of Word and the directions were for Word 201, I had to figure out a few things  and make a few adjustments. But I did it.

One of my New Year's resolutions (or intentions) was to learn how to format an ebook. To motivate myself to Kindle-publish, I asked Ed Mitchell, a writer buddy of mine, if he'd do a new cover.

While Ed worked on the cover, I thought I'd have to find someone to sit down with me and explain step by step how to format the text. But, thanks to some YouTube videos and Building Your Book for Kindle for Mac, I sat myself down and did it. I guess an old dog can learn a new trick or two. 

I uploaded my files to Amazon day before yesterday; this morning my ebook was available.  However, the cover image isn't displayed and the ebook isn't linked to my author page yet. While I had previewed how Patches on the Same Quilt would look on various readers (Kindle Fire, ipod, iphone, etc.) when I uploaded the files, I wanted to see how it would look on my iPad. So I downloaded the free sample. 

The cover looked great on my iPad.

The table of contents looked good too. Formatting all those links wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.

The text was crisp and clear. Paragraphs were properly indented (to the 4th character space) and the text displayed nicely (Times New Roman 12 was Amazon's recommendation).

Chloe compared the 2001 print version (too expensive to print a full color cover) to the electronic version. I think she likes the e-version better.

Chloe is checking out Building Your Book for Kindle for Mac, the free ebook I used to make my ebook. The version for PC is here, but I'm pretty sure Chloe will use a Mac when she decides to do her own ebook. She already has her title: Patches on the Same Kitty.

Meanwhile, until the kitty learns the new trick of making an ebook, you might as well buy mine. The ebook version of Patches on the Same Quilt ebook sells for $2.99. You can buy it here.

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